


Just This Side of Sanity

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: F/F, Family Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-14 01:10:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11772333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Being married to Diana means dealing with Diana's weird friends. Christie is mostly okay with this. Mostly.





	Just This Side of Sanity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/gifts).



> This could be either "they got back together post-S6" or "they never broke up." In any case, other canon events have happened as in the show.

Christie stumbles into an empty house at 9 a.m. from a much-too-long night ER rotation. She used to like working the night shift, a long time ago, when she was young and single. Now that she's a married mom, it's nothing but an enormous pain in the ass. Diana's car is gone; she'll already be off to work, having dropped off Theo at kindergarten on the way. Christie will need to pick him up at noon, after catching a couple hours of sleep, then blearily attempt to entertain an active five-year-old until Diana gets home, at which point she'll crash (or try to) for a few hours until she has to get up for --

The empty house is not empty.

Christie shrieks involuntarily and drops her keys.

"Good morning, Mrs. Lady Doctor Suit," Mozzie announces cheerfully. He's up on a stepladder (Christie is reasonably confident they don't even own a stepladder) and appears to be doing something to the living room light fixture. There's a glass of wine on the top step of the ladder, with the bottle on the coffee table beside an open toolbox. "Drink?"

Christie hunts through a few possibilities before she finally, wearily says, "Sure. I'll have what you're having." Especially since it looks like that's the bottle of medium-expensive red wine they were saving for their anniversary.

 

***

 

So the thing about Diana is, Diana thinks she's a total straight arrow. Never a crooked thought in her life. Solidly planted on the law-abiding side of the fence and all of that. Christie is very confident that Diana truly believes this about herself.

It's just that her friends are a bunch of weirdos and Diana seems to think this is perfectly normal.

Back when Diana was working at the New York White Collar office, it sometimes seemed to Christie as if Diana's job was actually some sort of Punk'd type of thing, with reality TV writers trying to see how far they could push the joke before someone catches on.

"Today my boss switched places with his criminal CI. Peter's getting pretty good at pickpocketing. I think we should all be worried."

Or: "My boss's criminal CI's arch-nemesis kidnapped him today, and I think we tried to ransom him with a stolen piece of million-dollar jewelry, but if I have to testify in court, I know nothing of this."

Or: "So we almost recovered a World War II submarine full of priceless art, but it blew up."

And so forth.

Now that Diana is working for Art Crimes in DC, her job itself seems to be at least 80% less weird. The problem is, at least some of the weird appears to have followed them from New York.

It's not _constant._ It's just that Theo tends to get packages from foreign addresses on his birthdays and Christmases (which Mom and Mummy carefully open beforehand; Theo currently owns more lock picking sets than your average five-year-old, which is to say more than none). It's the fact that Diana regularly checks the house for anything in the way of hidden hardware that wasn't there when she went to work. It's the occasional drop-in visits from legally dead people who are officially not there.

It's coming home to find a criminal drinking a glass of wine in their living room at 9 a.m. and simply considering this part of everyday life.

"What are you doing?" Christie asks, lying flat on her back on the couch, one hand curled lightly around the stem of her wine glass, watching him put the light fixture back together.

"Best you don't know, really. Oh, and don't tell Lady Suit, if you'd be so kind."

"You realize I'm telling her first thing."

"Ah, but what if I _expected_ you to?" Mozzie asks, tapping the side of his nose.

"Mozzie," Christie says, closing her eyes, "I had to treat a thirteen-year-old kid who OD'd today, and I held the hand of a ninety-two-year-old man while the woman he'd been married to for sixty-eight years passed away. I have to pick up my son in a little less than three hours, and I just need to sleep for awhile."

There's no reply, so she assumes he didn't hear her. However, she opens her aching eyes briefly when something soft and heavy lands on her legs. The soft thing is the weirdly lumpy afghan that her wife's boss's in-laws knitted for their wedding (she still doesn't know why Elizabeth Burke's mother _knitted them an afghan_ , but, well, there you go, that's her married life with Diana in a nutshell) and Mozzie is carefully arranging it over her legs.

"Just catch some shut-eye, Mrs. Lady Doctor Suit --"

"I have a name, you know," Christie groans, closing her eyes again. "I have to pick up Theo from kindergarten at noon. If you're still here, please make sure I'm awake."

Mozzie pats her knee. The odd thing is, as she drifts off, she actually trusts him to do it.

 

***

 

So of course she wakes up fuzzy-headed and exhausted with sunlight streaming across her face and the clock on the DVD player reading 12:19.

Christie sits up blearily. She didn't set her alarm. This is what she gets for trusting Diana's weird friends. Well -- it's only twenty minutes past, and it's not the first time one of them has been late to pick up Theo; they're both the kind of people who easily get lost in their jobs. She just needs to call the kindergarten -- it's just right down the street, it was one of the reasons why they chose this neighborhood --

The door opens.

"Mom!" Theo crows. "Uncle Mozzie is here! Did you know Uncle Mozzie is here?"

Mozzie, who is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of sunglasses, touches his finger to his lips. "Incognito, little man. In-cog-nito!"

Theo turns a blank look on Christie. "What's that, Mom?"

"It means ... uh ... invisible. Uncle Mozzie is pretending to be invisible." Christie rubs her eyes. "Do you want a snack, Theo?"

After she's deposited him at the kitchen table with a snack and almost managed to get her brain online enough to stop running into doors, she manages to corner Mozzie to whisper fiercely, "Why did the kindergarten give you my son?"

"I had a note!" he squeaks, flourishing a piece of paper.

Christie glances at it, just long enough to see that it's signed by both herself and Diana. She knows _she_ didn't sign it. "Do we really need to have that talk about forging our signatures again?"

"Only for a good cause!"

Christie lets her forehead clunk against the wall.

Still, the fact remains, Theo adores Mozzie, and while the two of them are playing quietly in the back garden (the name of the game appears to be "Grassy Knoll," and she really doesn't want to know any more) she decides to head off to the bedroom and see if she can catch another nap before Diana gets home.

 

***

 

She wakes up when a warm and welcome presence crawls into bed with her.

"Oh God," Christie mutters, squinting at golden afternoon sunlight painting the wall. "What time is it?"

"A little after six," Diana murmurs, throwing an arm over her and kissing the back of her neck. "Dinner will be ready in a few minutes, if you want. Or you could go ahead and sleep. I've got the barbecue fired up, so I can hold off on yours if you'd rather not get up yet."

Christie squints at the wall. Her brain still feels like it's stuffed with cotton socks, but her eyeballs no longer have that cored-out-with-a-melon-baller feeling that they get after she's been living on catnaps for a week straight. "I think I actually got eight hours of sleep today," she mumbles, staring at the wall. "More or less. Uh, Mozzie was here. I only meant to take a nap --"

"I know," Diana says with her soft, throaty laugh, pressing another kiss to Christie's neck. "He was here when I got home. He and Theo were being very quiet so they didn't wake you up. And also so that the government spy drones didn't pick up their conversation -- I really think it's about time for another little chat with Mozzie about appropriate things to teach our son."

"Ngghhh." Christie rolls over and squints at the bedside table with the ornate stained-glass lamp that Neal Caffrey brought them from Paris. The entire stupid house is full of weird things Diana's weird friends have given them. "I need to tell you, Mozzie did something to the light fixture in the living room."

"I know," Diana says. "It's been undone."

She doesn't volunteer any more information. Christie decides this is the kind of situation where ignorance is bliss. Instead she decides to go with a more normal question. "How was work?"

And they chat about that a little bit, and when Christie walks out, later, into the backyard, the grass soft on her toes, she notices that there's no trace of their afternoon houseguest.

Theo sits on the edge of the back deck, swinging his legs while he eats his hamburger. 

"I think it's only fair to tell you," Diana says, leaning on the railing after flipping their steaks on the barbecue. From the smell, she's using the sauce that Burke claims is a secret family recipe and Christie privately suspects is bought in bulk from some wholesale barbecue supply place. "I got another postcard from our Paris friend today."

Christie wonders if Diana is even aware that she's picked up Mozzie's habit of never saying Neal Caffrey's name in "insecure" locations, which effectively means anywhere other than Paris itself or the Burke house.

"Does this one have a puzzle on it?"

"I'm still trying to decipher it," Diana admits. "It's the third one in two weeks, though, which probably means we'll be having a houseguest soon."

Which _also_ probably means that Caffrey is here to steal something, which Diana seems to be weirdly okay with. Or else it means he's showing up because he has some information to share with the New York White Collar office on some case either they or Diana's Art Crimes division are working on -- completely under the table, of course. Apparently Caffrey doesn't like dealing with DC Art Crimes directly because of bad blood with the director-emeritus.

Christie curls her toes in the grass.

"Your steak's almost done!" Diana calls.

"Coming!" Christie calls back.

Everyone has to deal with in-laws. Christie knows she's inflicted a few odd ones on Diana, too, like her uncle Richard who likes to regale the family with peculiar facts about trains, or her cousin Josh, the alcoholic.

It's just that she didn't quite realize marrying Diana meant marrying her whole, strange, half-criminal, half-FBI family, too.

But in-laws are family too, and if that means making up the guest bedroom for a legally dead criminal so he can have a base of operations while he plots an assault on some DC landmark, apparently that is just her life now.

"Are you okay?" Diana asks, as Christie climbs the back steps, with grass stains on her bare feet. "I could tell Neal it's not a good time. Or, I guess what I'll be doing is passing a message along to Peter, who can get a message to him. Naturally Mozzie's never around when you need him ..."

"Neal?" Theo asks, looking up from his burger with a smear of ketchup on his nose. Christie's not sure if he thinks they're talking about his honorary uncle, or his playmate in New York, who he dotes on in an older-cousin kind of way.

"Don't worry about it." Christie swipes the ketchup off her son's nose with her thumb in passing before sliding an arm around Diana's waist, leaning against her wife's back as Diana scoops the burgers off the grill. "Our casa es, uh, Neal's casa, I guess."

"How is this our life," Diana sighs, leaning back against Christie, who clasps her arms around her waist.

"You wouldn't have it any other way," Christie says, and Diana snorts a half-laugh, and doesn't argue.


End file.
